


Trial By Fire

by Morgan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, During Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-08
Updated: 2010-04-08
Packaged: 2018-09-03 07:09:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8702365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgan/pseuds/Morgan
Summary: Character study of John Winchester. "John loves his boys. But Mary was his hope. What got taken from him that night was more than just his wife, the mother of his children."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).

Back in -73 things seemed clear. It was all there ahead of him, because he was still alive.

John was always good at what he did, even when he didn’t want to be. Loving Mary, he was good at that. Shooting people in the head - he was good at that too. Scopes made it easy.

He saw a lot of guys do their tour and just lose it. He didn’t. He had something to come back to. He had hope. It grounded him in the oppressive heat. There is no way to explain how grateful he was for that hope, for all the things Mary represented for him.

You go all kinds of crazy in the jungle. You do. It doesn’t matter how ready they try to make you, that space, it just splits your notions of what life is wide-open.

 

A trip-flare going off out front and the shapes of men moving toward the barbed wire.

Five or six terror-filled hours staring out at the black wall of the jungle.

Body odours, cordite after a fire mission, and the tangible humidity.

Leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.

Sleep disorders and exaggerated startle reflex.

Rain that came about noon almost every day.

The blue green spiral of a tracer round.

Anti-malaria tablets.

Bunkers hit by RPGs.

 

The nights, dragon ladies, booby trapped bodies, mosquitoes, the sun, the random strafing from an enemy they never saw or even heard until they opened fire… the unrelenting heat and the bitter cold.

Being so far from home.

Being somewhere where nothing made sense, everything was dangerous and you couldn’t even read the street signs. Wild, insane moments of ground combat.

They couldn’t make you ready for any of that.

When John signed up he had been filled with this sense of purpose. He actually believed what they fed him, but that wasn’t what settled it for him.

It was that night out by the ravine when he sat on the hood of a car he’d borrowed from the garage and drank a beer and looked out in the gloom of a falling dusk and he had this feeling, like he was meant for something bigger than just the family business, being a grease monkey, like the whole world was out there and he just had to go.

Made some of the best friends he ever had in the war. It was strange, intense friendships that turned sour if someone took your Skippy and talked trash the wrong way. They got mended just as quickly when the guy next to you dragged your head down when he saw the muzzle flash before you did.

Nick. John still thinks of him. A big, black guy from Detroit, about as tough as they make them and unlike anyone John had ever met before. He saved John’s life and laughed as he did it. When John tried to thank him he just grinned, big and wide, jungle-dark tiger smile and something so fiercely alive in him that John felt scared.

They went on R’n’R together and that’s when things got even weirder. John was drunk and high and so fucking grateful to be alive that he just went wherever Nick lead him. He woke up in a hotel bed in the early morning hours and saw Nick standing in the door of the room connecting to his. John wasn’t thinking, he wasn’t even really awake.

Nick was naked, slick with sweat and every muscle on his sculpted frame shone in the dawn light. He was pressed close to a slim Vietnamese youth, cradling his face in both hands and kissing him so slow and so sweet. John didn’t understand what he was seeing, hazed and befuddled and still under the influence. It made him horny and angry and so fucking confused that he didn’t know what to feel. It was two guys kissing, something he had never seen before. But that wasn’t what messed with him.

It was the way Nick cradled the Vietnamese guy’s whole head in his huge, big hands and the gentleness seemed so incongruous when they spent so much time killing these people, fearing them. Nick was kissing the enemy.

John had closed his eyes. When he woke again he wasn’t sure what he had seen, the elfin features of the Vietnamese androgynous to him at the best of times. He always felt huge and stocky and hulking around them. Even the fierce interpreter attached to his unit, Hien, American born, seemed slim and fragile.

They weren’t, though. These people were so much tougher than anything John had ever seen. Guys back home thought they were something, but until you try to eke a life out of a rice paddy when you’re being shot at from all sides, you haven’t got the first idea what being tough is all about. “Trial by fire”, Nick would say and grin huge.

Trial by fire.

John was brought up with the kind of morals that say it’s alright to cheat on your taxes, but you can’t steal penny candy from the local store. It’s alright to lay with another man’s wife, but it’s not alright to say you’re fucking her. It’s alright to kill for your country but never kick a man when he’s down.

John has seen people, friends of his, wearing their insides on their outside, desperate and begging. He’s seen a lot of things that have changed him in fundamental ways down deep in his core.

John has faith. Bloody, tangled, wrenched sideways, maybe, but he has faith. There are no atheists in foxholes. It’s no leap for him when he hears “demon” the first time. It takes nothing more than a little adjusting to incorporate things not of a natural order into his universe. He’s seen too much already.

John loves his boys. But Mary was his hope. What got taken from him that night was more than just his wife, the mother of his children.

After a little while he figures it out. The boys have to be able to protect themselves. This demon, this thing that came for them, it isn’t done yet. It’s not like lightning that can only strike once in the same spot. They are a lightning rod now, the Winchesters, it can strike as many times as it likes. He has to make sure his boys are ready. John is good at what he does.

Dean and Sam.

Both his boys are a surprise. John still remembers the way it felt the first time Mary put Dean in his arms and told him “our son, John, our beautiful baby boy” and he looked into those blue beyond blue eyes and felt redeemed. That feeling didn’t last long. He had a little more than four years of it, enough time for Dean’s eyes to turn green. That’s about as much as someone like him, weighed down by the things he has done, can ever hope for.

His boys. His beautiful boys.

John was a soldier for such a short period of time. It wasn’t even a sliver of his life and yet, it defined him. In the days after Mary’s death he felt that same cut back, primal basic fear and need for survival as he had felt in the jungle and he fell back into the numbness of combat readiness without hardly a hitch. He knew he could survive past the pain that way and he had to – for his boys.

And for revenge.

People kept telling him, back in the early days, that he should take it easy, he had his boys to think of. They didn’t understand. John could see the bull’s eye painted on them. So he started to learn.

Hunters are a weird and different breed. He’s met all kinds, from the reckless fools who hardly survived a weekend to the old veterans that had seen more weird shit in their lifetime than anyone should ever be made to, stuff that made the war seem like nothing by comparison. He tried to learn from them all, fools and wise men alike.

John knows he wasn’t always there for his boys when he should have been. He’d look up from some hunt, from some faint trail of the thing he’d been chasing and three months would have gone by, Sammy suddenly riding a bike, and when had he learnt that? Or Dean refilling the coffee cup by his elbow saying something about the rent. John knew that he focused too hard on the things he needed for himself and his boys. It made him lose track of the place they were in right now.

He starts Dean in it early. Bobby and him, they argue about it, but Bobby doesn’t know what John knows. Bobby can’t see the bull’s eye.

Dean takes to it like a duck to water. John takes him out shooting and he pops the bottles like nothing and then turns to John with this smile, this wide, little kid grin, that’s so true John doesn’t think his chest is big enough to contain the huge wave of pride and relief that washes through him. Dean is a natural. And where Dean goes, Sam will follow.

John looks at his boys sometimes and thinks they are the best part of him. It clenches his gut to think of all the things they can’t have, but they have to be safe. They have to be ready. There’s a storm coming.

John doesn’t even know when he stops being their father and becomes their drill sergeant. He can see how hard Dean works for it, he can see how Sam follows and then suddenly all the smooth effortless timing between his boys changes. Can’t really put his finger on it. There’s something in Sam’s eyes he doesn’t understand.

A gun in Dean’s hand is not the same thing as a threat, not unless he means for it to be. It’s not like that with Sam and John doesn’t get why. A gun in Dean’s hand is like an extension of his will, something he can use, like he uses his sweet, charming smile, or his ability to rile the locals to hustle them at pool. When Sam handles weapons they are always deadly.

John thinks maybe it’s because he drilled them on safety before anything else and sometimes, just sometimes in the dark of night, he thinks he started Sam in it too early. Sam has this awareness of how lethal things are in a way that Dean doesn’t. To Dean every tool is a means to an end. He’s cavalier about a lot of things, but not that. John thinks he understands Dean better. Dean understands Sam, though. Blind, deaf and mute the boys would still understand each other.

His boys have matching skills and strengths. They have everything that they need. They are vetted and cleared. They are well equipped and well trained. They have grown into everything John hoped they would become, a team. A unit. Safer together than apart.

Dean, cocksure and willing to go the extra mile. Dean will do anything to keep them all safe, John knows that. He gave his boys unity and loyalty as a creed. He doesn’t have enough hope and faith to give that too.

Sam, with all those smarts and all that sheer determination. Sam is going to back Dean up, no matter what. Sam loves his brother even when he hates his guts and that’s fine too. That’s what can be expected, one of those intense friendships born under fire. Sam isn’t easy to lead. Sam is the one who questions.

Sometimes John keeps them safe by keeping them in the dark. There are things they aren’t ready to know. He has his curse boxes and his own mistakes and much later there’s that thing in Minnesota.

Meanwhile his boys grow closer and close ranks. He didn’t see that coming.

And then Sam leaves.

It’s every bit as bad as you would think it could be. Dean is broken in unparalleled ways and John is no better. He knows he said some awful things and Sam wasn’t far behind.

“No kind of life”, Sam had said and John wanted to shake him hard enough to rattle his teeth.

Sam doesn’t see the bull’s eye either. Somewhere along the line John lost him. It’s not that Sam doesn’t get what it is that keeps their little unit working, it’s just that he doesn’t want it. Dean had been a handful in his teens, but not like that. Dean and John, they worked it out. He gave Dean purpose, increasing responsibility, a sense of self-worth, all that. Sam doesn’t need any of those things. He has Dean. John’s not sure how that happened either.

They’re listing to one side without Sam. They needed him in the mix because he saw things from other angles, saw other tactical advantages and other stratagems. Sam was growing into a fine hunter when he suddenly decided that books and college and all that had more appeal.

John thinks about that night at the ravine again, thinks about how he had felt that he was meant for something more, something bigger than what his daddy wanted for him. He had a different kind of argument with his father about going into the army, but is was frighteningly similar in some ways.

John’s dad had called him a fool and told him that this was without a doubt the dumbest thing he had ever done. John had told his father he was meant for something else. John had told his father that he would never understand. John had told his father a lot of the same things that Sam had been trying to tell him for years and in a sudden flash John got what his dad had been trying to say. He had been scared for John’s safety the way John fears for Sam when Sam leaves.

It’s weird, that dance of life, where you suddenly realize you turned into your father when you weren’t looking.

No one is ever free of their past. It weaves in to the present and informs your every decision. It doesn’t mean you can’t make better choices, different choices, but you’re never free of it just the same.

It doesn’t mean he isn’t still royally pissed at Sam. He is. He can see what it’s done to Dean, he can see how badly it hurt. He’s hurt too, but Dean is left without his backup, without his purpose and he’s been hammering that in to Dean for years, what Dean is supposed to do is look out for Sam. Not because Sam is a frail little boy anymore, but because there is more to Sam than meets the eye and one day Dean might be the only one who has even a snowball’s chance at getting through to him when it's needed.

They are fated, his boys, there’s no doubt about that. For what? Now that still hangs in the balance.

There’s one more thing John has to think about here and it has to do with the day Sam turned sixteen. John hadn’t thought of that time he spent trailing after Nick in the soggy streets of an Indochinese night for a long time. There was always something off about that memory, other than just the blanket of insanity that was the whole war experience. He knew what he had seen, Nick kissing that Vietnamese guy, he knew what that was. Since then John has seen every configuration, every way of living your life that you could imagine and he never judged unless there was something abjectly wrong. Life was life, love was love.

Dean took Sam out drinking the night he turned sixteen and John acted like he didn’t know what the boys were up to, but he still sat up by the TV, half-dozing until they got back. When he’d heard the rumble of the engine he’d gotten up out of his scavenged recliner and went to the window just to see what the damage was.

For a second he could smell the lingering damp of a Saigon night when he saw the way Dean was holding Sam’s face cupped in his hands while Sam’s hands were resting with comfortable ease on Dean’s hips. They were posed in silhouette against the streetlight and everything about them colluded to make the same tableau John had woken up to in that hotel room so many years ago.

It was like getting sucker punched in the gut.

Dean hadn’t been kissing Sam, just brushing his thumb along Sam’s cheekbone and Sam’s eyes were clearly closed, but there was a wealth of intimacy there, a deep undercurrent of something John hadn’t figured on. It was the way Sam relaxed under Dean’s hands, but it was also the way Dean seemed to own his brother’s space. It might be that John was putting it all together wrong, still a little foggy from half-dozing in front of the TV, but it looked like more than casual affection.

He had gone back to his chair and sat down heavily, rubbing his hand over his mouth. It was one of those clear and heartbreaking moments where he knew he had done something to his sons to make them this way, something that went deeper and ran under their every interaction like an underground river.

When his beautiful sons stumbled through the door minutes later he could see the abrasion on Sam’s cheek, something that looked like a graze and he knew that had been the reason why Dean had held him like that, checking him over, making sure it wasn’t too bad, but despite all that something about the closeness between his boys still itched at John.

It hit him that night that he wasn’t the only one who had gone through the trial by fire the night Mary died. Dean had come through carrying his baby brother in his arms. Sam had come through wrapped up in a blanket and held by Dean.

John had held Dean in his arms and Dean had held Sam. That was the way it had stayed for too long and now there was Sam watching him with sullen eyes and a vague tint of contempt and an abundance of anger. Sam who had only ever had his boundaries set by John whereas he got everything else from Dean, even his lunch money.

It was too late to do anything about all that, but maybe John came down harder on Sam because of it after that night. Maybe he pushed right back when Sam tested him to see how deep it went. Sam’s eyes ticking over to Dean when they fought only meant Dean mattered more than John did. Once or twice he caught Dean’s slight headshake and knew that when Sam backed down it was so he wouldn’t cross Dean.

“You gave up on this family long before I did, John” Sam told him on one of the really bad nights and when Sam banged out the door that time Dean hadn’t gone after him, just sat at the table with his gun half-assembled in his hands and his eyes steady on John in a way that meant he had heard that from Sam before and maybe didn’t all the way disagree with that assessment.

"Go after him, son", John had told Dean.

And Dean had looked up at him with a slight smile gracing his lips.

"Not yet, dad."

"Jesus, Dean. Just do as you’re told."

"In a minute, sir. He needs to burn some of that off first."

John understood Dean. He understood what that kind of commitment was meant to mean and he understood why Dean didn’t follow Sam out the door. Dean hadn’t given up yet, not on neither of them. John saw that his boys, his two golden sons, knew each other well and knew when to push and when to back off and he hated that he couldn’t figure Sam out like that anymore.

More worrying is the feeling that the unit he’s trained, the thing he wanted most, for his boys to be there for each other, has turned into the two of them forming a united front against him. It’s not like that, not really, they bicker and fight with all the brutal honesty of true brothers, Sam and Dean, but there is something there that John can’t get at. They know each other through and through and there are secrets there, as impossible as that might seem the way they live.

So maybe he was a tiny bit relieved when Sam packed his bags and slapped his acceptance letter down right at the centre of the table and told them he was going. He didn’t ask. He didn’t even argue. He just said he was going like it was a done deal.

Dean had shut John off for weeks. He had been curtly polite, removed and distantly angry in a way that grated worse than Sam’s raised voice and viciously sharp tongue. Every time John’s eyes met Dean’s he could read the accusation there. “How could you?” John knew that giving Sam ultimatums hadn’t worked for years. He’s asked himself that same question time and time again. “How could I say don’t come back?” How could I? He should have left the door open and the porch light on.

The prodigal wouldn’t return. It wasn’t in Sam’s nature. John had known that. Maybe in his heart of hearts he had known that whatever was between his boys, whatever he had felt or caught as an undertow, wasn’t something he could ever put a stop to. Maybe that’s why he had let Sam go to find his own way.

He’s usually a good tactician and he knows that pushing isn’t always the way, especially not with Sam, but faced by that still, flat look in Sam’s eyes he flew off the handle good and hard. He goes back over the last couple of years and sees the snappishness in Sam grow more and more terminal, more and more determined and Dean being so good at defusing the situations as they arose only meant John wrote it all off as something to do with Sam being a teenager when he should have understood that it was Sam being Sam.

John went to work on this thing that was his boys fated trail anyway and everywhere he looked he saw the same thing. Two brothers, one path. Two brothers, light and dark. Two brothers, one destiny.

He found no trace of himself in that tale. Nothing more than a looming shadow and the hint of a sacrifice he would be forced to make, but he couldn’t make heads nor tales of whatever that meant.

In the apocrypha he finds references to a pair of brothers. He finds more details in other texts and it says the same thing over and over. He’s not sure what any of it means and when he looks at Dean he doesn’t want to have to go deeper, but he still knows he needs to. It’s the things that come back over and over that make him feel the need to break away from Dean on hunts now. He needs to go places he doesn’t want Dean to follow and he needs to see what is to be made of the father of the two brothers.

Comes a time in all men’s lives when they need to start thinking about what kind of legacy they will leave behind. What will they say about him when all this is done? Will they say he was a just man? Will they say he had vision? Will they say he was wise? John knows that his name will only be remembered as the shadow that looms over his boys. They are the ones fated.

Things aren’t clear anymore. Even a single purpose gets muddled and complicated over time. Sam is somehow in the mix, it all hinges around that. John knows there is no way he is ever going to be able to deal with the fall out, but Dean can. Dean who took to the life like he was made for it is going to do whatever it takes.

There are references to that too, though John doesn’t put much stock in them. He fears that the thing that rose up in Sam’s room the night of the fire has blighted them and is going to make Dean pay sorely for his mistakes. The sins of the father hanging heavily over his boys’ heads. He can’t do much about that, except hunt and hunt and hunt.

Lore becomes more and more obscure, the things he has done tread the line between right and wrong more and more often. He doesn’t know anymore what else there is except this burning need to be done with the longest hunt of them all. He finds ways of tracking the thing that took Mary. He finds the means to kill it.

Things aren’t clear anymore, but maybe, maybe, if he is really lucky – he can be redeemed again by ridding the world of that thing and that will be the act that sets his beautiful boys free from fate. He’s tired. He longs for simpler times, knowing full well there never really were any. He will do whatever it takes to give his boys the freedom to chose for themselves. It will come at a price. He knows. But he’s willing to pay it.

 

END


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